Day: 2016-05-15

This past week has been an interesting week, the FBI managed to make into so many headlines that they became the topic of conversation more times than one could keep track of.

Here are just a few headlines:

“FBI Director James Comey; Viral videos of police brutality lead to more crime” Reuters

“Encryption is essential tradecraft of terrorist groups” Bitcoinist

“FBI Directors scary murder talk ignores the math” Bloomberg

“Spikes in murder rates no coincidence” RealClearPolitics

The Washington Post is also up today “We have a problem. Homicides are up again this year in more than two dozen major U.S. cities”

It’s like the shock and awe week in terms of law enforcement. James has no real numbers let alone any proof that viral videos of police brutality lead to more crime. The reality is this, James claims that police are now hesitating due to the Ferguson Effect and viral videos. If a cop is hesitating he/she needs to stop being a cop period.

In fact, telling the media and society that because of recent events our officers are now afraid to do their jobs, is heard by society as, “our police officers in this country really don’t know how to police in today’s world.”

Our illustrious FBI director is losing his edge, his ability to reach out and gain public support, most importantly he is losing the trust of the public. By telling us so many times how police in this nation are now hesitating while subtly blaming the citizens of this nation for it, we lose faith in law enforcement as a whole.

In my piece a few weeks ago about who is going to police the police I stated quite clearly what part of the problem is. We have departments that had a multitude of issues because it’s been allowed to continue for years. It is so big now because of social media and of course viral video. If departments or police fear doing their jobs, hire better cops. Hire cops that the public can trust then.

The truth is, most citizens in fact do have something to hide. Not that what an ordinary everyday citizen might be hiding is anything that would land them in jail.

We hide things from those we love like infidelity, porn, eating habits, the sex they identify with, the sex they prefer to sleep with, someone who claims to be a devout Christian purchasing dildos and ball gags online or liking bondage porn, and the things we tell our best of friends via text, email or chat, drinking too much the night before or ending up sleeping with someone we just met.

No one wants the majority of that intel to be known about him or her because we are shamed by our own behaviors, which is wrong and an entirely different topic we can have at another time.

The point is that yes, most of us would hope that our government is not snooping into our private lives because we are shamed and might feel some level of guilt about something we do on a regular basis…so too are our police. They don’t always want us to see what they are doing on the job because it’s not always the right way or the best way, might be against policy.

Yes I know police and the director will say no, no we can’t let the public see all of our activities because they have to keep some level of secrecy…bullshit. A cop is comparable to an actor, he chooses a very public lifestyle, if a citizen sees a cop arresting someone they have the right to record it. It’s really a simple matter of an arrest not being private like an investigation might be.

Our FBI director and government can’t possibly think that any citizen in this nation is under some misguided impression that the police are above us let alone any different from us. Part of the biggest reason we have so many bad cops or cops that get into trouble while off the clock is in fact, because they are just like the rest of us.

The problem for them is that in today’s society, it’s becoming a lot more difficult to hide that they are just the same as the rest of us. The public if this election season hasn’t already taught you this, is no longer willing to just sit by and take shit, especially if cops are acting badly and doing more harm than good.

The director of the FBI should focus less on blaming viral video and things like the so-called Ferguson Effect on police not doing their jobs and focus his attention on the actual problems. It’s not fear of being recorded, it’s fear of not really being able to do the job correctly which gives you the answer and that is our police in this nation lack training. The training and trust me I hear about some of the weekly training is so not in line with today’s world it’s laughable.

The message is, stop relying on excuses and blaming it on things that you can’t back up and try fixing the problem. I believe that would suffice as far as the citizens of this nation are concerned.